Karazin Kharkiv National University sits on the northern side of Freedom Square in a dignified Neoclassical complex that dates largely from the 19th century. The main building's red-and-white facade is one of the most photographed in the city, and the grounds — with their mixture of lecture halls, laboratories, and a university museum — convey the sense of a place that has taken scholarship seriously for over two centuries.
The university's influence on Kharkiv is hard to overstate. The city has more than thirty institutions of higher education, many of them clustered in this area, which gives the student-heavy neighbourhoods around the university a distinctive energy — abundant cheap cafés, second-hand bookshops, and a politically aware street culture that has made Kharkiv a centre of Ukrainian civil society. The university museum, open to visitors, chronicles its own extraordinary history including its role during the Second World War, when the institution continued operating even during the German occupation.